Enhancements to game balancing and loot distribution?

[Sonoffrost]

G'day!

I'm a huge fan of Darksiders 2 and this new deathinitive version got me so excited that my socks rolled a full 360 in my legs! Especially when they announced the improvements to "game balancing and loot distribution". Have you guys played it enough to see any nice changes to the original? I remember having a lot of trouble understanding the abilities of loot, like "Arcane critical change" etc. so any changes there? Also any balancing between the Harbringer and Necromancer trees?

[ZerafutEX]

There's no real balancing on the game itself from what I've been playing, just an adjustment on the plethora of loot the game was giving you.
You won't have your inventory flooded with pointless stuff every mile when killing ennemies, but and some bosses give you unique rewards (basically unique weapons you'd get elsewhere in the original game) to better reward you for downing those bosses.
Which means you'll have a harder time getting the posessed weapon of your dream (still achievable only harder).
Some bosses they said were harder, especially the end boss since it was ridiculously shockingly bad, but I haven't yet finished the game and didn't encounter that much resistance from bosses (then again I'm on NG+ with an op stuff).
Regarding the terms of your loot, nothing has changed on this point, if you have trouble understanding, you can just look at the wikia which is very complete on the subject or you can just ask me on some terms, I'd be answering with pleasure.
The DEATHinitive difficulty looks like an apocalyptic, only harder, you take more damage and heal for way less than in the other modes ( I believe 1 health potion now only restores half your health or less). I was very disappointed in the new difficulty. I was imagining something like the Dante must die ♥♥♥♥ in DMC.
Overall, not so much of an improvement gameplay wise, but sooo satisfying to play with graphical enhancements. The environments are so much more colorful than the original and the high res textures are gorgeous. If you haven't yet tried it, I'd say, dive into it, the game in it's current state still has a very few bugs but the devs give almost daily updates and patches on what troubles the players the most.

[devSin]

It seems to mainly be smaller changes (there were no major skill or item changes beyond incorporating the DLC equipment into the campaign). They said they couldn't really provide a list because it was just adjusting a lot of numbers.

They did make a change to loot distribution, with the intent that you may not find as much loot but should generally get better loot; in practice, I don't really notice it too much, but you can now get chests which don't have any items (you just get the normal gilt that all chests give), which is disappointing (it sucks when you go through the trouble to get one of the special chests and open it and get nothing at all). It happens a lot, unfortunately.

They did tune some encounters (including a few boss fights), and they redid the entire Earth section (the story of how it worked in the original was interesting). There are no new moves or abilities, but they did adjust things like health and some of the attack timings.

There aren't any changes to make the mechanics any clearer. You'll need to ask on the forums if you have questions about how certain things work.

[The Fifth Horseman]

Originally posted by devSin:

they redid the entire Earth section (the story of how it worked in the original was interesting)

Are you sure about that?

[devSin]

Yes. The designer said he ripped out the AI system and the static spawns that were used in the original and went back and placed everything by hand.

The flow is the same (you'll still see the same groups of enemies in the same places), but the balance should be better now.

[IkkouSoryu]

One thing I would like seeing addressed is uselessness of merchants. I'm lvl 22 at the end of NG right now. I have one and a half million gold and no way to spend it, because every merchant's inventory has like only 10% of elite items, aka the only thing worth buying. Sometimes I check in to find that there's no elite items at all.

Then there's the issue tha said elite items CONSTANTLY have garbage stats like exp or gold boost. The chance of having useful combination of stats is practically nil. I'm still using lvl 14 blue talisman (which dropped from some chest) because it alone has the Execution% and Health on execute combo. Not a single merchant talisman for half of the game had two of these stats together.

Another thing is that merchants forget to refresh their inventory, or their inventory is only refreshed upon quest completion... Point is, it takes forever to see new items. In old DS2 you only had to travel between worlds to refresh inventories. Nowadays this doesn't work.

And my rant is over.

[PancakeWizard]

Originally posted by IkkouSoryu:

One thing I would like seeing addressed is uselessness of merchants. I'm lvl 22 at the end of NG right now. I have one and a half million gold and no way to spend it, because every merchant's inventory has like only 10% of elite items, aka the only thing worth buying. Sometimes I check in to find that there's no elite items at all.

Then there's the issue tha said elite items CONSTANTLY have garbage stats like exp or gold boost. The chance of having useful combination of stats is practically nil. I'm still using lvl 14 blue talisman (which dropped from some chest) because it alone has the Execution% and Health on execute combo. Not a single merchant talisman for half of the game had two of these stats together.

Another thing is that merchants forget to refresh their inventory, or their inventory is only refreshed upon quest completion... Point is, it takes forever to see new items. In old DS2 you only had to travel between worlds to refresh inventories. Nowadays this doesn't work.

And my rant is over.

You always find the best stuff from loot, even in the old version that was the case. The merchant stuff was just useful for filling gaps until you found something better or feeding your possessed weapons. Have you been to the DLC areas yet? Explored the mini dungeons?

[ZerafutEX]

Originally posted by IkkouSoryu:

One thing I would like seeing addressed is uselessness of merchants. I'm lvl 22 at the end of NG right now. I have one and a half million gold and no way to spend it, because every merchant's inventory has like only 10% of elite items, aka the only thing worth buying. Sometimes I check in to find that there's no elite items at all.

Then there's the issue tha said elite items CONSTANTLY have garbage stats like exp or gold boost. The chance of having useful combination of stats is practically nil. I'm still using lvl 14 blue talisman (which dropped from some chest) because it alone has the Execution% and Health on execute combo. Not a single merchant talisman for half of the game had two of these stats together.

Another thing is that merchants forget to refresh their inventory, or their inventory is only refreshed upon quest completion... Point is, it takes forever to see new items. In old DS2 you only had to travel between worlds to refresh inventories. Nowadays this doesn't work.

And my rant is over.

I found my op lvl 30 talisman at Ostegoth's, it depends, it's all a matter of luck in the end

[Sonoffrost]

A pity, I would've loved to see a good overhaul in the game balancing and loot system but don't fix what is broken I guess! Thank you Zerafut for the offer to help but I found a good guide in Steam so everything's a bit clearer now! I think that the Harbringer/Strength build is much more powerful than an Arcane/Necromancer build so those could've been balanced but hey, it's ok in it's current state I guess :)

[IkkouSoryu]

Originally posted by PancakeWizard:

You always find the best stuff from loot, even in the old version that was the case. The merchant stuff was just useful for filling gaps until you found something better or feeding your possessed weapons. Have you been to the DLC areas yet? Explored the mini dungeons?

Please, persentage of elite items in the loot in both versions is laughably small, unless we're talking Crucible rewards (and I'm not ready to spend ~15 min to get one chance at decent gear). So no, merchants weren't for filling the gaps, they were reliable source of elite items. I remember bying good talismans from Ostegoth for my executioner build several times in the old version.

Nowadays I pay him a visit and he doesn't have a single elite robe or elite boots... what the hell happened.

[ZerafutEX]

Originally posted by IkkouSoryu:

Nowadays I pay him a visit and he doesn't have a single elite robe or elite boots... what the hell happened.

No need, spellbinder set is the only viable set :p, it's cheap and it's a lvl 5-8 build 8D